WinterWelVaart: Groningen’s Christmas Market
WinterWelVaart is Groningen’s annual Christmas market, with an unusual maritime twist that makes it extra special!
Western Europe
Visiting Valor in Villajoyosa
Last spring in Guadeloupe I visited an archeological park where I got to sample the pulp from a fresh-picked cacao pod. I heard more about chocolate cultivation at two coffee plantations. Given my obsession with chocolate, I decided to take the process a step further on my short visit to the Costa Blanca in Spain,…
Red Light Secrets Museum of Prostitution: a review
What I expected on visiting Red Light Secrets Museum of Prostitution was a presentation that titillates and that presents prostitution as a happy profession with practitioners who choose to become prostitutes. Note: I’ve updated this post with some remarks from a “part time excort whore” who commented on it on Twitter. See below. Disclosure: This post contains…
Alcoy: My Too-Brief Visit
After a gorgeous, winding drive through the mountains from where I was staying in the Costa Blanca, finding the Refugio de Cervantes Bomb Shelter Museum in Alcoy took me another hour or so. The delay was due to its humble signposting, and by “humble” I mean a simple sign on a gate next to a…
Driving Costa Blanca: Some Advice
If you’re ever in the Costa Blanca in Spain, here’s what I’d recommend: get away from the coast! Yes, you can enjoy the beaches and party till the wee hours in the coastal towns, but there’s far more to see inland. The drive I did the other day, for example, was absolutely lovely. Leaving from…
Hash, Marijuana & Hemp Museum Amsterdam
It’s not surprising that Amsterdam is home to a museum of Hash, Marijuana and Hemp, given its generally tolerant policy toward soft drugs. You’d think, given the somewhat subversive subject, that it would be entertaining to visit. It wasn’t. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, I…
The Museum of Bags and Purses Amsterdam
Added in May 2021: I just found out that this museum closed in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. I’ll leave the review here as it is, in case anyone is interested in what it was like. For the sake of full transparency and before I describe my impressions of Tassenmuseum Hendrikje, the…
Body Worlds Amsterdam: Museum or freak show?
Warning: If you’re squeamish, you might want to click away…but please share this post before you go! Body Worlds: The Happiness Project exhibit in Amsterdam is described on its webpage like this: “More than 200 anatomical specimens of real human bodies show the complexity, resilience and vulnerability of the body.” In other words, at Body Worlds…
Gothic Barcelona: A Walking Tour with a Difference
As you know, I attended the TBEX travel bloggers’ conference in Lloret del Mar recently. While I was there, I was fortunate to be able to take a walking tour of Gothic Barcelona offered by Context Travel. They operate walking tours in more than 36 cities, “the world’s cultural capitals,” around the world. Context Travel’s unique selling…
Gala Dali Castle: Dalí’s Gift to his Muse
If you like Salvador Dalí’s art—even if you’re not such a fan of his work—the Gala Dali Castle in Púbol, Spain, is something you should not miss. This is not a Dalí museum. Dalí bought the building, a medieval castle, as a gift for his wife and muse, Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, who was called simply Gala….
5 Reasons to Visit Lloret de Mar
(Nederlands versie beneden!) When I told people I was going to Lloret de Mar for the last week of my one-month solo trip (Guadeloupe, Martinique, New York, Lloret de Mar), the usual reaction was something along the line of “Lloret de Mar? But why?” Lloret de Mar has a reputation as a party city, along…
The most beautiful Starbucks?
You know how sometimes you get so used to what you see every day that you stop noticing it? I’ve walked by the Starbucks in the Groningen central train station hundreds of times in the course of commuting to and from my job up in Leeuwarden. I just didn’t pay much attention to it until…
The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam: A review
You could easily be forgiven if, at first, you just walk by the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. You might notice that it’s pretty, but so are so many houses along the old canal rings. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means I’ll receive a small commission on anything you buy through clicking the links….
Van Loon Museum: A restored Golden Age house
After the Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder museum and The Canal House Museum, our last stop was the van Loon Museum, a restored Golden Age canal house. This is what I’d been expecting when we visited the Canal House Museum: rooms that give an impression of how wealthy residents of Amsterdam’s Golden Age lived and, to…
Canal House Museum Amsterdam: A review
I already posted about the first of the three little museums I visited in Amsterdam with a friend: Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder. After a bite for lunch—Burgermeester has surprisingly good burgers!—we moved on to the Canal House Museum Amsterdam (In Dutch it’s called Het Grachtenhuis.). It’s not surprising that a canal house museum is housed…
Ons Lieve Heer op Solder: A surprising little museum
Tourists in Amsterdam, if they visit museums at all, generally hit the big ones: the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh, for example. But there are dozens of smaller museums in Amsterdam that are just as interesting and worth seeing. Ons Lieve Heer op Solder is one of them. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If…
Yes, you CAN visit the Rijksmuseum in 2 hours!
I’m not a museum person. That’s not to say I’m not interested in art, or natural history, or science, or whatever the museum is about. It’s just that I don’t have the patience to concentrate on one thing for very long. At the same time, I’m not physically up to it; for some reason standing…
An unusual walking tour in Athens
It was just my luck that the day I’d signed up to take a walking tour in Athens, there was torrential rain. Nevertheless, this tour – covering religious Athens under Ottoman rule – was fascinating. Disclosure: I received this tour for free, but all opinions are my own. It never occurred to me, to be honest,…
St. Maartens Day: A sweet local tradition
Today is St Maartens Day here in Groningen, a children’s tradition that is relatively unique to this area. On the 11th of November, once the sun goes down, children go door-to-door begging for sweets. Instead of threatening “trick or treat” like on Halloween, the deal here is that they sing a song, and in return,…
A one-day Greek island cruise
I’ve been to Athens before, so I’ve already done the usual Athens itinerary like visiting the Acropolis. Disclosure: This is a sponsored article in that I was given a free ticket to the cruise in exchange for writing about it. All opinions, however, are my own. So, with only one free day after my conference was…
Bicycle baptism
All we were trying to do was to get out of the car while it was stopped in traffic. The plan was to walk to the restaurant two blocks away while my husband went to park the car. It made sense. I stepped out on the right side, but not before saying to the kids…
Watery Hubris
That’s part of this admirable hubris: complete and utter self-confidence.
Forbidden Spaces in Chateau Chaumont
What intrigues me almost as much as the chateaux we’ve been visiting, is what we usually haven’t seen. The rooms that are all done up for the tourists, dressed up, you could say, are lovely: period furniture; beamed, painted ceilings; ornate tapestries; and so on. There are signs explaining who lived there, along with interesting…
Arromanches 360 circular cinema: A review
My oh-so-laconic son, on exiting Arromanches 360, remarked, “Even I found this one moving.” Take my word for it: that was high praise indeed, coming from my perpetually-unimpressed teenager. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. This will not affect your…
The Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy: A review
In the same week that I visited the excellent In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium, I also saw the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux, France. The two museums are quite comparable: the first is about World War I in the Ypres Salient; the second looks at the D-Day invasion of…
War graves in Belgium: Living among the dead
Belgium is without a doubt the best place to learn about World War I and to visit historical sites related to the war. It has a number of museums, most notably the In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, and hundreds of cemeteries and monuments. In places, the scars are still visible of the relentless shelling…
How NOT to design a bathroom!
What’s wrong with this picture? We ate lunch yesterday at a café in Gent. Afterwards, I went inside to use the toilet, followed the signs upstairs, came around a corner, and saw this. Except it wasn’t quite this; there was a man standing at the urinal, making some very contented sounds while he peed. I…
In Flanders Fields Museum: A review
An effective museum doesn’t just display items drily in glass cases; an effective museum gives those items meaning to the people viewing them. It entertains, but it also makes visitors think. It gives the items an emotional weight. The In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, is one of the most effective museums I’ve ever…